Sunday, June 5, 2016

A Summer in Amber Version 3.1 released

Version 3.1 of A
Summer in Amber is making its way out into the world. Thanks to
daughter Nel, who highlighted the typos and missing commas she found
while reading the story on her ipad and sending those notes on to me.
With her help, I have eliminated a number of sloppy edits, and other
typos in the first half of the Story. Stay tuned for Version 3.2,
which will include the second half of the story, once Nel gets to
reading that.

It does appear easy
in iBooks to highlight any mistakes you find, which can then be
easily emailed to me. In the email I only get just what is
highlighted, so that if you highlight only the mistake, that, and the
chapter it is in, is all I see, which can make some typos hard to
locate. However, if you highlight several words before the typo to
give me something to search for, I should be able to find and correct
the mistake easily. I mention this only because if you would like to
call mistakes to my attention, this is a very easy way to do it. I'm
not sure how it works on the kindle, but it might work similar. The
key, however, is to give the mistake a little context. I can usually
figure out what is wrong on my own, so you need only to call my
attention to the mistake to get it fixed.

Speaking of
mistakes, I happened to be reading the back of my bag of potato chips
the other day and came across this:

This is a photo of
the back of a bag of “Lay's Classic Family Size!” potato chips.
The blurb reads in part: “It all starts with farm-grown potatoes
– cooked in and seasoned to perfection.”

While it is
reassuring to know that Lay's don't use those cheap, factory made,
plastic potato chips made in the sweatshops of China, only potatoes
grown on farms, what I found confusing was that fact that they appear
to be “cooked in … perfection.” Huh? “Cooked in 100%
vegetable oil and seasoned to perfection” or “cooked and
seasoned to perfection” makes sense, but “cooked in and seasoned
to perfection” does not. Could this be to be a typo – and one I
actually noticed? As it turns out, yes! The BBQ version's blurb does
not include the “in” after cooked, making it read, “cooked and
seasoned to perfection.” QED

I report this only
to show what a year into self-publishing has done to me. Not only am
I seeing the odd typo for the first time in a couple of books I'm
re-reading, like for the third time, but I'm seeing typos on potato
chip bags. The horror, the horror! It's like I can no longer ignore
the little man behind the curtain… And I'm spending time
thinking about whether it's “a while” or “awhile” while try to
pretend it actually matters…

Just kidding. Proper grammar and
correct spelling, like cursive writing, is vitally important if we're
to remain a literate society. ;)

Oh, and one final note, I see that Amazon is now selling Some Day Days at cover price. Or perhaps I should say, "offering to sell". Good luck to them with that. In any event, that is Amazon's decision, not mine.